How do we style ourselves and others as scholars in the field of critical education? What parts of ourselves and others do we regard as salient (or not) in our accounts? And what are the forces that underlie such decisions? In this article, I submit that secularisation is a persistent epistemic and ontological condition that shapes the study of key figures in critical education. Through a sketch of how eminent radical educator bell hooks is commonly represented in this field -- and recovering the threads of Buddhist thought from her own corpus as a counterpoint -- I consider how the secularising impulse may obscure some of her unique educational insights and produce racialising effects, specifically the whitewashing of her intellectual provenance.